


❄ Bookstruck: "Do You Wanna Hear a Story?"

by Otherwise_Uncolonized



Category: Frozen (2013), Tangled (2010)
Genre: Abandonment, Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Alternate Universe - Childhood Friends, Alternate Universe - Different First Meeting, Angst, Anxiety, Arguing, Bittersweet, Bittersweet Ending, Bullying, Character Study, Childhood Memories, Childhood Trauma, Coming of Age, Crossover Pairings, Cute, Demiromantic Elsa, Denial of Feelings, Depression, Disney, Drabble Collection, Elsa-Centric, Emotional, Emotional Constipation, Empathy, Escape, Escapism, Evil Elsa, F/M, Falling In Love, Father-Daughter Relationship, First Love, Flirting, Fluff, Forbidden Love, Friendship/Love, Growing Up Together, Hallucinations, Hurt/Comfort, Identity Issues, Illegitimacy, Innocence, Introspection, Isolation, Kindness, Kindred Spirits, Let It Go (Frozen Song), Loneliness, Loss of Innocence, Loss of Trust, Love Triangles, Love/Hate, Male-Female Friendship, Minor Elsa, Not Beta Read, Off-screen Relationship(s), Opposites Attract, Orphans, POV Elsa, Parallels, Platonic Romance, Pre-Movie(s), Psychological Drama, Purple Prose, Random Encounters, Rebellion, Reminiscing, Reunions, Romantic Angst, Running Away, Secret Crush, Self-Acceptance, Self-Denial, Self-Discovery, Self-Doubt, Self-Esteem Issues, Self-Reflection, Servants, Snow Queen Elements, Trust Issues, Unconventional Format, Unhealthy Coping Mechanisms, Unrequited Crush, Unresolved Emotional Tension, Unresolved Romantic Tension, Visions, Warm and Fuzzy Feelings, What-if Challenge
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2016-08-14
Updated: 2016-08-14
Packaged: 2018-03-18 20:06:16
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 3
Words: 11,610
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3582210
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Otherwise_Uncolonized/pseuds/Otherwise_Uncolonized
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>❍༺❄༻❍</p><p>
  <i>"He could go anywhere he wanted to go; he could do anything that he wanted to do―"</i>
</p><p>And for a child who couldn't, it only made her think of windows with no sunlight and bedrooms with closed doors, parental guidance that advised her to, <i>"never go anywhere until you've learned how to suffocate under the weight of your own gloves."</i>

</p><p>Yet a fairy tale-obsessed orphan thinks he's found a real life wizardess behind the closed gates of Arendelle. Even though her innocence is stifled, her existing is what keeps his anchored.           

</p><p>"You used to be my confidant. Now you're her husband."
</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. ༺❄ The Story

  

   

༺ **[** ❄ **]** **༻** ♕༺ **[** ☀ **]** ༻   

 _"And this is where we bury our hearts,_  
_between self-defeating personality disorders,_  
_and burnt bridges,_  
_and midnight ramblings,_  
_embedding our memories in forsaken homes_  
_like it is a conscious decision to shed_ _our wings_  
_(but reptiles don't fly)"_

* * *

~* **by intricately-ordinary**

 

 

. ❄  _(i was the yesterday hiding from my tomorrow; you were the tomorrow running from your today...)_

_❄._

❄ .

❄ .

_. ❄_

❄ .

Sometimes a princess must die a thousand nights before she can grow tall enough to see her own sunrise.

 _"You're hiding in the library too, huh?"_ He'd pat her head like she was an abandoned kitten, doing what he did to all kindred spirits without childhoods. _"Don't cry,"―_ pat, pat―" _do you wanna hear a story?"_

The stories in question were redundant.

Swashbucklers.

Adventurers.

Nobles.

Rogues.

Figureheads of freedom.

Men made out of stardust.

_"He could go anywhere he wanted to go; he could do anything that he wanted to do―"_

―And for an eight year old who couldn't, it only made her think of windows with no sunlight and bedrooms with closed doors, parental guidance that advised her to, " _never go anywhere until you've learned how to suffocate under the weight of your own gloves."_

Yet _Flynnigan Rider_  could go anywhere he wanted to go; he could do anything that he wanted to do. No right ― no wrong ―  _no rules for him._ He was free _._ Her heart was a bird and her ribs were a cage, but the man with the smolder was born a phoenix. She projected her limitations onto the rogue made of ink, picturing how it would be to live inside paragraphs of unpunctuated freedom; to be―

 _"Just like him,"_  the servant boy bragged with his voice strung up to its top note.  _"Someday, I'll be just like him ― straight out of all the fairy tales. I'll make my own destiny, get my very own castle, and live far, far away ― as close to the edge of the world as possible! I'll rise like the breaking dawn and catapult off cloud nine."_

The girl paused, feeling her heart muscles twist as if a key was turning in a lock.

_"The past will be in the past, and I'm never going back. I don't care what they're going to say. I'll test the limits and break through."_

She wiped her tears off the illustration in his book, aware that she could never plagiarize his lyrics. He, like the figureheads of freedom, possessed that peculiar, hormone-raging lust for escape, the confidence to shed his sheepskin and  _make life happen_. But every wild boy had a shackled foot and broken childhood that held him down. She saw the leg iron when he looked away, beaming at the window like an earthbound god no one ever tried to name a star after.

_"I want to hear the story behind your eyes..."_

He looked straight at her. Closing in. Closing up. Like an oyster with a pearl broken in two parts.  _"I don't have a story."_

She frowned, making her hands into small fists on her lap. Something had clouded the constellations in his eyes ― something she had not seen, but felt. Something stowed away and guarded by a kraken in the deep blue sea of his heart.

( _you wanted valuable treasure because you were nobody's treasure)_

The boy's body language grew timid and awkward. Goosebumps broke out across his arms as his knees knocked with the same  _please-don't-look-too-close_  that lurked between all twenty-four teeth in her twenty-four hour smiles. Part of her wanted to laugh at the scenario  _―_ a throaty, strained laugh with disbelief and understanding coughed up together. They were  _pauper_ and _princess_ , but they stifled self-consciousness equally. Masked weak self-esteems. Couldn't tolerate any sunlight hitting the darkest, deepest parts of the forbidden shelves in their untouched libraries.

All she had was a three-line script to perform a role her parents had written for her. All he had were fantasy books to rewrite stories that had no happy endings.

_(our ink lines were smudged but we tried our best not to seep through the paper)_

_"Do you want to see Orion's Belt?"_  The boy looked at her upside down, never right-side up, just as he did all the world _. "If I took you to the stars, would you make me a castle?"_

She squeezed her knee with one hand while palming her tears with its sister, shaking her blonde head under the apricot fingers that clutched it.  _"You'd catch a cold..."_

He laughed.  _"Fair enough. Then how 'bout an ice sculpture of myself? My supernatural looks were born to be commemorated!"_

She smiled shyly. His heart still glimmered with a giddy affection for the first ice castle he ever saw her make, which had been conceived on the night that a naughty orphan went poking his nose around the wings of his new workplace. Under the Treaty of Våler, Arendelle accepted an inpour of Coronan orphans every summer to serve its nobility, and Eugene had been one of many assigned to Arendelle Castle's belly. Papa said that such orphans were  _"different from other Coronan orphans; they will have fewer opportunities in their adulthood, so Corona is giving them a special trade."_  She knew not what this "special trade" was beyond unpleasant tasks, but she knew that Anna had liked Eugene since she was two.

Through Anna's fondness mushroomed her own fondness for the imp. Being raised on medieval tales with mermaids and merlins had made him believe that she was Nimue herself, and she'd found it charming back then.

_(but you and i weren't meant to be in the same plot)_

_"―Fitzherbert! Where'd you run off to, you no-good varmint?!"_

She jumped.

He dropped his book in horror.

Wait.

...No.

_No no no no no no_

_no no no no no no_

_no no no no no no_ _―_

The sprigs of ice on the wall behind her sparkled like evil trees. The boy before her trembled like a ghost in a shell. Fear hijacked her body and threw her across the library, piloting her through  _Mythology_  and  _Science Fiction_. Elsa passed bookcases of parallel universes where melodramas like these ended with  _happily ever after_  in big, cursive letters. Two hours of sobbing against cold novels and there were no  _fairy godmothers_  to cry into. Guards were searching the halls, shouting left and right, and she was folded into a ball behind the _Angst & Tragedy_ aisle.

 _"If I were you, I wouldn't hide in the_ _macabre_ _."_ Nervous chuckles reached her ear. _"Edgar Allan Poe will always give you_ _papercuts..."_

Elsa gasped and backed into a bookshelf. Avalanches of  _Gothic Romance_  rained down, snowing her under  _Jane Eyre_  and  _The Hunchback of Notre Dame_. Elsa tried to protect her head with her arms, but her sorcery did a better job by building an awning of icicles. The princess's shivering state kept her from looking up at the masterpiece above her. She whimpered and hiccuped with her slimy nose tucked between her knees, fingers still gripping the flaxen mop atop her head.

_"El-El...sa...?"_

She could feel his fear.

 _" **El**_ _―_ _sa, **look**  at me."_

Fear for her.

...Fear for  _her_?

_"I need you to gimme your hand **right**  now **―** "_

_"NO!"_  Her wail was a firecracker.

Eugene's hand snapped back.

_"Don't touch me!"_

Eugene's hand lowered, trembling...

 _"Pl-Please..."_  Sniffle.  _"...I..."_

Am a curse.

_(and you didn't have enough ink to rewrite that...)_

_"I-I'll hurt you,"_  Elsa sniveled, changing the sentence that sat on her mind.

Eugene's pupils breathed fear. Pity. Empathy. The look of a boy who didn't know what was happening to his brain as he watched hers decay. She covered her face with her palms to shut him out, weeping because she could not be Lady of the Lake anymore. 

 _"You? Hurt me?"_ Eugene joked, trying to make himself feel better.  _"Princess, you couldn't hurt a fly if you tr―"_

Elsa almost screamed into her fate-lines, _"I'm just trying to **protect**  you...!"_

Eugene went mute. She waited for him to abandon her, because she deserved to be abandoned. She prayed for him to never speak to her again, because she could kill him like she had almost killed Anna. She prepared herself to tell him to  _go away_ , to  _erase_ _her_ from his archive of fairy tales, to run back to his pallet in the servant quarters and―

 _"Well,"_ his voice said as it hugged her, defying her order, _"then you'd be the first..."_

Elsa's fingers separated from their sisters.

_"...But thank you."_

Tears dropped off her cheeks like pearls as she lifted her face to stare at him. Despite all his goosebumps and shaking hands, he stared at her with a smile that seemed to hurt his own heart.

_(all those years of being alone made it impossible for you to leave me alone)_

He patted her head like she was an abandoned kitten, and she let him pat it because she was lost in the reflection that gazed back at her from his cookie dough eyes. The girl she saw in them was not a girl, but a woman ― a beautiful, breathtaking woman enrobed in blue frost and confidence.

 _―_ _"Your magic just has a bit of a cold today, that's all,"_ Eugene proposed timidly. _"_ _Merlin had to practice before he got good, you know._ _All the enchantresses_ _get wizard's block every now and then―"_

 _"― **No**!"_  Elsa ripped away from his sunset touch, holding her hands against her chest.  _"I'm nothing like Nimue! I'm―..."_

A monster.

_(and that burning sunrise in your hands couldn't thaw my frozen forevers)_

Elsa pressed her temple against the bookcase and curled her arms around herself, shrinking into her shadow.  _"_ ** _Please_**.. _.just go **away** ," _she demanded, unaware of the ice that was creeping over her knuckles.

An anvil of silence dropped between them.

 _"You know, Princess_ _..."_ He paused to stand up, still skittish. _"...I honestly don't have all that much in me to like,"―_ he sounded afraid of his own voice _―_ _"but I've always liked you."_

An absurd plot twist.

 _"...Why?"_ An absurd moment of weakness and disbelief.

_"...Because you're like the wizardesses in all those stories―"_

_(i was a_ **_plot hole_ ** _in my own story)_

 _"―with powers that make you unlike anyone else in the whole wide world...but for some reason, you don't like yourself that much, either."_ Ended with an absurd, nervous laugh.  _"Imagine that?"_

_"..."_

And with that, he let her be. Sunrise climbed the mountains, blazing through the library and melting Elsa's glaciers. The ice retracted from her fingertips in turn, shrinking into clumps of nothing due to the warmth climbing up her chest like the breaking dawn. She wiped her nose as she sniffled, smiling. Weakly. Tearfully. Painfully.

_(i was never a fairy tale)_

❄.

_❄ ._

_. ❄_  
❄ .

❄  _(but i was the book you never put down...)_

* * *

_"I'll make two pairs of cardboard wings,_

_one for you and one for me,_

_so that one day when we get old we can fly to the sun_

_and make sky castles to live in forever..."_

~* **by intricately-ordinary**

* * *

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Cover by @kingdomdance.
> 
> This is a gift fic. [The Quivering Pens](https://archiveofourown.org/works/3581169/chapters/7895061) was not something I wanted to recommend to the young requester (if only for its ideologically sensitive content), so I decapitated one of its predominant themes and smithed its own AU for her to enjoy. The setting was meant to be told like a memory being revisited. After this one-shot, "Bookstruck" was asked to be serial. I never had that in mind, but it happened.
> 
> To clarify, even though I like it unsaid:
> 
> If you've read Frozen's supplementary books, you'll know that Elsa didn't stay in her room throughout her childhood. The book "A Sister Like Me" (and Anna confirms it in Frozen as well) depicts Elsa walking around the castle and frequenting several areas. She anxiously ignored Anna the entire time, who trailed behind her in an effort to get her attention before stopping altogether. In this one-shot, she's sulking in the back of her father's library because she needed a book to cheer her up, but she found a book thief instead. She's also eight and gloveless here, so she hasn't reached the stage where her powers are overreactive.
> 
> The interaction that Eug has here with Elsa is similar to the dynamic she allowed between herself and her parents: emotionally distant, but physically accessible, due to them knowing about her powers before she realizes that she can hurt them by accident, too.


	2. ༺☀ The Words

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> I think everyone in the Tangled fandom already knows this history about Eugene's name; if I were him, I'd hate my name, too!

* * *

_"Learn to love yourself."_ **~*birdsonqs**

* * *

_"Illegitimate."_

According to the shouter, he had been umbilically attached to that word since birth _._

_"You're illegitimate."_

_"What?"_

_"Invalid."_

_"You don't say."_

_"A freak accident."_

_"Welp—"_

_"A waste of egg and sperm."_

_"..."_

_"And you don't belong."_

Laughter enringed the garden.

_"...I'm sorry, gentlemen, but I think you've got me mixed up with someone else—"_

_"Do you ever get tired of hearing 'Fitzherbert' when you know the name is synonymous with 'bastard?'"_

The eight year old princess felt her own hair raising at the insults, but she was too clean behind the ears to understand the meaning of the words.

_"You must get sick of watching the kids with families play."_

She passed this huddle of commotion every afternoon on her way to the library, stopping to witness the grandstand of classism being paraded by her own kin. In the beginning, she didn't understand why Eugene was avoided after the utterance of his last name. She concluded that his lack of friendships had something to do with being poor or orphaned — and perhaps the fact that his "apprenticeship" involved the most disagreeable duties in the servant halls — but the  _poor_  and the  _orphaned_  did not accept him,either. He was also sidestepped by her high-nosed governess, shunned by Papa's guardsmen, and likened to a "pitiful sob story" by the clucking maids, yet he was not handicapped or deformed to warrant such reactions. Being a misfit by social class was bound to attract judgment in the world, but there was nothing on his skin — nothing on his face —  _nothing frosting his hands_  — to indicate any external oddities. His aesthetic features and  _normal_  genetic makeup should have given him the companionship of at least  _one_ coequal. Instead, the servant boy read books alone in the garden during lunch, rubbing his superiors the wrong way with theatrical one-liners from those very same books.

_"When's the last time you bathed, boy? Even rats keep themselves cleaner than you do."_

The loaded bigotry she heard made her want to put her little foot down. Never should any kingdom comprise of highborns treating the underprivileged like  _lesser than's_ by shaming them for a birth that they could not control.

_"What does it feel like to say, "Hi, I'm illegitimate," when people ask your name?_ _It's a sorry name for a mouthy bastard like you. It tells everyone exactly where you come from: nothing._ _Do you even have a birth certificate?_ _"_

_(your name was the certificated reminder that you were born_ **_inferior_ ** _)_

Eugene's words became inaudible when they cornered him against the stone walls, but she could make out the results even from the hedges. The pauper lacked machismo — all signs of muscle meat, really — and opted to defend his hind with a  _brains-over-brawns_  attitude, which only infuriated the guard trainees he vied. The lad was fast becoming a clown, and he most likely intended to blather negotiations like one until he managed to slip out of their hands like an eel — but this was not what happened.

_"Oy, you! You darn well know you're nothing but a peasant!"_

Such an outcry shocked her. The ring leader had gotten a hold of the weasel, roughed him up, and asked his posse to search him for any belongings, stolen or otherwise. Once they found a storybook with what appeared to be his name scribbled on the back, they cheered,  _"Eugene, the bastard of a scoundrel named Herbert!"_  like hecklers. Then they proceeded to make fun of his backstory as "the dirty little orphan" before flinging his book — the first and only thing he owned — into the mud.

_"Hey!"_  His signature savviness, the one that made him seem untroubled by everything, was now destroyed. He didn't even sing,  _"Gentlemen, please!"_ as they closed in. Like a stray dog with his tail between his legs, he gawked at their towering shadows in fear.

_"St_ — _..."_ Her voice would not come up or out because it was parched from the guilt of having oversimplified his life in the past.

_"Orphans do not have a normal upbringing,"_  Papa once said, having hoped to make her know something of the world.  _"They do not get a normal household, a normal childhood, or even a normal stroll out into the city. They are sheltered, by all means like crammed hens shivering in a coop due to their traumatic separations from their families, and by having no biological parents to nurture them, they are thereby branded illegitimate citizens by default."_

She would later ask Papa what it meant to be a  _Fitz_ , and he told her that modern communities stamped the prefix onto children born out of wedlock, specifically ones unacknowledged by their fathers in the gentry. If not mutilated at birth, such stigmatized infants were abandoned in orphanages with poverty and ostracism poisoning their futures. Most astonishingly, the suffix which followed  _"Fitz"_  was the assumed father's name, so for Eugene, that was,  _"Herbert."_

Her father went on to contend that the presence of  _"Fitz"_ was more than a name tag on an orphan's collar. In the  ** _God-fearing_**  world, it was a birthmark of shame.

A product of sin.

A—

_"Bastard."_

The presence of _"Fitz"_ literally named him, _"Eugene, the bastard son of Herbert."_

_(...and all you had was your name)_

She chewed on her braid.

—  _"...Don't you have any friends, Eugene?"_

—  _"Nope."_

—  _"Why not?"_

—  _"Simple: they'd drag me down!"_

How many times a day did he lie to her back then?

_"Get your book, poor boy. It's getting dirty."_

With her geometry books hugged against her ribs, she tried to fathom how it would feel to be burdened by what at first appeared to be letters.

A name.

A social construct.

An extension and identification of who you are.

Labels.

**Words.**

Big yet small.

Petty yet persuasive.

Definitive and evil.

_(ones your parents, destiny, and society chose for you...)_

What daughters of power they had to bring self-esteem to the ground.

_(to bring your self-image to the ground...)_

The word, "poor."

The word, "orphan."

The word, "bastard."

The word, "illegitimate."

The word, "alone."

_(are not what make you)_

Yet she finally understood why there was no hiding from them for Eugene. His parents, who are no more than strangers, had not been available to grant protection or concern. They did not hand him a single tool, glove, sword, or shield and say,  _"Just conceal it; just put on a show."_ But here he was doing it all by himself. Here he stood, performing theatrical one-liners, boasting quotes from a rich man, idolizing another's glorified status...romanticizing what he was  _not_.

And therefore, running from what society said he was. 

_"Someday, I'll be just like him ― straight out of all the fairy tales. I'll make my own destiny, get my own castle, and live far, far away ― as close to the edge of the world as possible! I'll rise like the breaking dawn and catapult off cloud nine."_

_(and run away from a damaged, undesired child)_

His parents could not lock the gates and close the shutters to help him pretend that the scary world wouldn't touch him  _―_ that the deterioration of his environment did not turn his childhood into his prison. He had to grow up fast and become a man without any tutoring.

_(you_   _have been umbilically attached to destitution since birth)_

Yet still he said:  _"I'll test the limits and break through."_

She looked at the boys coaxing him on to remember that he's  _less than._

_"Aren't you upset that no one wants you?"_

_"Aren't you sad that you'll never be good enough?"_

_"Aren't you mad that your parents hated you so much that they chose to hide their shame from society over raising you_ _?"_

_"Stop it!"_

The boys dispersed like vultures leaving a carcass. Elsa entered the garden with her hands folded in front of her, emulating a beautiful statue of grace and authority, but the baby fat in her cheeks betrayed her greenness. The pages didn't stammer out their excuses upon her intervention; they straightened up and kept their heads bowed out of respect. Her lips squirmed as she stared at their scalps. Although she did not wield the power of the Crown to expel them, an injunction was issued: she would tell Papa about their dishonorable conduct and request that they scrub [potty pots](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chamber_pot) _with_  the boy.

Sweat rolled down their noses as they looked from one friend to another before lowering their eyes. Eugene seemed unharmed, but he still trembled from where he sat with his arms over his head. He peeked through the crook of his elbow when he heard her boots crunch the grass. Channeling the statesmanship of Papa, she ordered the young trainees to return the servant to his feet at once. Eugene clambered up with the help of halfhearted arms, swaying off balance as he tried to wrap his brain around what was happening.

The pauper's bullies were dismissed, yet the pauper didn't watch his bullies leave. He studied the princess as though she was an eye test chart, his overworked heart beating with confusion, and perhaps a little terror, also. Elsa watched his eyebrows draw forward as his lips moved to the words:

_"...You saw."_

Her emotions were all flattened together in front of her face now, and her wide-set eyes were topped with a puzzled frown.

_"That."_ Pause.  _"All of that."_

She flinched. There was some kind of pain behind his response _,_ some kind of utter stupidity _,_ because he was implying that he was _ashamed._  Not ashamed that his origins had been dragged through the mud, but ashamed that she'd seen and heard it.

_(the prologue to the downer sob-story)_

She bent down, touching the fallen book on the floor, and then affectionately picked it up, extracting mud with her handkerchief. A smudged page read:

  **❍༻** **༺♕** **༻** **༺❍**

_THE TALES OF_

~~**/E/U/G/E/N/E/** ~~

~~**/F/I/T/Z/H/E/R/B/E/R/T/** ~~

_FLYNN RIDER  
_

**❍༻** **༺♕** **༻** **༺❍**

_(and it was then i wondered how much paper you wasted crossing out your name)_

Her thumb brushed the paper's fold, passing over the scraggly letters of his birth name. He could slather it with ten bottles of white-out if he tried ― could wash the dirt of poverty off his hands until it turned the water black ― but it would still drip behind him when he walked into the room. Into the world.

_(into the masquerade ball of adulthood)_

Maybe it was better to carve out one's own little place in some alternative universe after all. One where sob-stories end with  _And I Lived Happily Happily Ever After._

_(...far, far away)_

She gazed at the front cover of the man who'd been born a phoenix, and, with obvious reluctance, held the book out to the pauper without looking him in the eye.

He accepted it hesitantly before turning from her to thumb away a tear—

_"'Herbert' means illustrious warrior."_

Eyes blinking, Eugene looked back at her with the shocked, desperate stare of a person who wanted to hear something a second, third, and fourth time.

_"Papa_ ― _..."_  She paused. Grounding her voice. Looking down at her restless fingers.  _"My father said 'Herbert' means illustrious warrior."_  Her voice became smaller. Shakier. Going away.  _"And Eugene_ ―"

_"And Eugene?"_

Elsa gave him a pointed look before recovering from his brazen interruption. _"...And 'Eugene' means―...'noble.'"_

The tension in his forehead started to unwind. He was only capable of whispering,  _"'Noble,' huh...?"_

She dragged her wet eyes across the floor before darting them back to him.

A sad, lopsided smile climbed his face, but it was still a smile. Eugene sat down with an exhausted little plop. He crossed his legs as he began drying his book cover with the end of his shirt.  _"So then what does 'Elsa' mean?"_

Although her soft-spoken voice was guarded, she managed to answer him with a childlike openness:  _"Noble."_

The look on his face after she said that ignited the boyish foolishness in him. She almost recanted the statement with a self-conscious,  _"Papa said_ — _,"_  but he was already scoffing.

Eugene ducked a half-sigh, half-snort behind his wrist—disguising a moment of laughter—and then faced her again with laughing eyes.  _"If this is the foreshadowing of some romantic comedy, then I've gotta give kudos to the playwright."_

...She smiled, shaking her head and laughing with her shoulders instead of her mouth, before looking down at her gloves. Only smiling, as it were, at the utter ridiculousness of his smile.

* * *

_"Sometimes it is okay to be an asteroid rather than a sun."_ _**~ *birdsonqs** _

 

* * *


	3. ༺☀ The Message

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> A/N: The symbol (*) stands for canon information from Disney's official storybooks.

* * *

_"The stars always said good things about us._

_I begged you to follow me back into their arms but_

_you were always too afraid of knowing yourself to listen._

_You're the writer now, so take a pen and make something happen."_

**~*by Peppermint-Pictures**

* * *

_―_ **"Fear will be your enemy."**

❅  _(but you urged that life, reality, and one's existence, were entirely what you imagined them to be)_

_❄ ._

❆ .

_❄ ._

She remembers the first time she saw him fly.

_(Like a reincarnated Icarus, you never learned how to soar, but you tried to flap)_

He dashed towards her garden's secret passage with a stolen pendant jiggling from his pocket, his entire form transforming into a lightning streak across the field. Half of her heart wanted to break through her teeth and scream for Kai, but the other half pumped with a sick anticipation to see this through to the very end.

_―"The past will be in the past, and I'm never going back."_

She balled up the hem of her dress with whitening knuckles, watching from her window like a domesticated owl watching a falcon.

_―"I'll test the limits and break through."_

Adrenaline, which had been sleeping in her system for years, stormed up with a thunderclap.

_―"I'll rise like the breaking dawn."_

She stared at the boy with an overwhelmingly powerful desire to move her legs.

_―"and catapult off cloud nine."_

It angered her that he could do it now. Eugene could live his dream without being scolded or dragged down. The boy had no prohibitions to chain him to the floor at all, none except the conditions of being illegitimate, orphaned, and impoverished, but if he ran fast enough ― if he shed his dead skin cells and traded them for feathers ― he could be as wing-footed as he liked.

_(though you had other handicaps that I didn't consider)_

Before his outstretched fingers could touch the exit  _(you never should have flown this high)_ , he was snatched off his heels by a guard, and her first instinct was to swallow the blood pulping her teeth. The consequence of biting her bottom lip had flayed the skin from the muscle, so she reclined to dam the blood with a handkerchief that stung her mouth.

_"You again, is it? The Fitzherbert of the halls."_

The scene below her feet ended with Kai's arrival. Refusing to bother the king with the boy's antics, Kai saw to his isolation with a flick of the wrist and a dismissal of the guards.

_(Daedalus said the point is to fly neither too low nor too high, but you made the mistake of aiming for the sun)_

The keys to Eugene's "penitentiary" were jingled and snatched into Kai's palm as he strolled out of the hallway with a whistle behind him. Eugene was often escorted to solitary confinement for "acting up." Kai, when spoken to, called the isolation a form of juvy. The boy called it pitch black.

Cold.

Gloomy.

A strange, alienating place with only a keyhole of sunlight to look through.

She'd pass the door on her way to her own "correctional facility," turn an ear to hear him picking the knob with unconventional utensils, and then feel her intestines turn out like a sleeve. His grunts echoed in the foreground of her mind, but it was not so much the boy that she was visualizing when she studied the door. She would watch her spirit split from her body and approach the barrier with a shaky hand, the very fingers hovering over the latch to the prison of another trapped person.

An angry person.

A screaming person.

A demon girl with black hair and goblin features.

 **"That perfect girl is gone."**  The demon's chants were constantly spilling through the hinges of Eugene's slammer like a cobra's hisses whenever she passed it:  **"Restriction, restriction, restriction. Standing frozen in the life you've chosen."**

She'd dream about the cackling face in her mind at night ― this distorted, hideous goblin pounding into the wood with fistfuls of wrath. Her shuddering soul begged to let her out―

 _―"Be a good girl, darling,"_  her father's words resounded, mooring her conscience.  _"Be a good girl for your father and mother._ "

_(be the good girl you always have to be)_

She rolled over and faced the ineluctable fact that she could never contradict her father's rules and let that neglected child out.

_'Because you can never break character.'_

Yet the more she heard the voice behind,  **"that perfect girl is gone"**  war with, _"be the good girl you always have to be,"_  the more she felt her ice storm grow under her heart. In her quest to submit to a strict regimen without complaint, she had only tripled her billowing passions by ignoring the desires of the alter ego that thundered inside of her.

_(conceal it; don't feel it)_

She wished on the stars behind the thunderclouds to not have needs ― to be peaceful and rippleless like the frozen lakes in the North. Whereas Anna overindulged in the liberties of a butterfly, she wormed into her  _goody two shoes_  and put shackles on in the morning with her dresses.

_(all for my own catalytic good, though)_

_"Do you think those gloves will be enough? What if the magic shoots right through them?"_

Her hands had not glaciered a single windowsill since the gloves, but her mother still excelled in her role as the neurotic parent, constantly airing her own crippling doubts and fears while she shadowed her daughter like a hummingbird.

 _"They'll help."_  Papa was her only anchor ― the overtaxed therapist with textbook solutions for parapsychological problems.

_(but this tunnel vision was turning out all wrong)_

It was so incredibly easy for Elsa to lose herself to the formal, subservient character she presented when she believed her burdens expected such a martyr out of her.

 _"You'll be fine, Elsa,"_  Papa would say.  _"You'll be fine as long as you conceal it."_

Everything would've been better if he had simply told her that their lives would have rest if she was not only emotionless, but fearless as well. Level-headed and "all together," like him. That to measure every word with a teaspoon and fake what it meant to be "normal" would "benefit her" in all aspects of life. Unfortunately, he was too loving to be honest.

_(too kind to say that I wasn't born to make choices)_

So for all her back-breaking, she didn't rebel or tell her parents where their rules could go; she accepted her conditions and smiled sheepishly as the shadow of the gates closed on her face.

_(you can't break character, Papa said. you have to yield to your circumstances. live a life with nothing for yourself. bend your back and just hope it doesn't snap)_

And it was here where the thorns of resentment grew into barbs against her nervous, goody-two-shoes heart.

_"Kai, that bastard boy has abandoned his station again."_

To perch her window and see her pot-scrubbing friend try to "break out" became addictive. The lad was conscienceless _,_  unlike she, but his brain was always spinning with new ways to reconstruct life as he had it. He was not waiting ― sorrowfully, stoically waiting ― for the clouds to break open, thaw his ice cave, and show him the sun. His almond eyes were flashing with the rays, forever hot with a rebellious passion far from the gimlet of hopelessness.

 _―"I've never been good at just standing still,"_  he'd brag.

Flapping off the ground of the courtyard to leave that spurned orphan in the dust was his only motivation because  _nothingness_  was an occupation he couldn't live for.

_―"But I've got my own reasons for that, Princess."_

She recalled the time he said that he saw what servants became after their masters dispatched them.

_―"People step over their starving bodies in the streets. Kids like me get ignored by Cross and Crown as is when we're fed to the wolves, so imagine being poor, too._ _Why do you think the orphanage dumped me here to become some domestic servant for your kind in the first place? This isn't my dream. Even landowners withhold property from my own to keep their names taint-free, so if my human rights are that screwed up, I'd rather opt out of dying as a homeless man on some cold backstreet or collapsing on the castle floor once I get too old to clean piss pots. Orphans_ _don't even have family to know when or if we die."_

And that made him the saddest. He didn't tell her, but she knew.

_―"There isn't gonna be any place for me to belong, so I'm making my own, and that'll be that."_

After hearing his drunken tale, she began to watch his failed escapes religiously. She began to spectate the tragedy of someone else being confined for  _not wanting to be restrained_  to the pitiful circumstances of their birth. She'd almost leave the balcony feeling exorcised through a transference of negative, pent-up energy, provoking him a little each time to run away ― to get into trouble ― to anger his supervisors ― to give them the finger.

_(turn away and slam the door)_

She projected onto him all of her guiltiest, darkest feelings as he repeated this routine over and over by asserting the defiance she simply couldn't. The word "can't" wasn't in his DNA. If it was, then he didn't understand the term or what it would be doing in his blood work to begin with. He ran on some dreamer's will of, _"I believe [that I can be free]._ "

_(and remade into someone better)_

...And soon she wondered if he would get along with  _that girl_. That ambitious, headstrong goblin who wanted to be running far away from home. He'd probably argue that he "didn't have a home" like she did, but as far as she was concerned, she did not. What she had was a jailhouse. Not an orphanage or a servant hold, but a jailhouse all the same.

_(yet that didn't stop you from rattling the bars of mine)_

_"So there's this story―"_

_"You're not supposed to be here!"_

_"I'm not...?"_  His smirks would always laugh for him.  _"What's this? Are you saying we can't see each other anymore?"_

_(not until i had parted my own clouds and freed the sun. until that happened, i didn't want to cloud yours)_

Elsa gaped at Eugene from where she stood like a sweaty, pigeon-toed eyewitness on the scene of a burglary. With her shoulders hiked up to her neck and her geometry book under her chin, her body was perpetually trembling from some frightful vision of her father lecturing her for allowing a flirty servant boy to perch the balcony of her tutor's study _._

 _"You're not ― supposed ― to be here,"_  she hissed through her teeth.  _"Go away!"_  She shooed him with her free hand the way a maid might shoo a bird.

 _"Just hear me out!"_  His hands went up in defense, but his expression was full of jest.

The expressions on her reddening, chubby face ― chubby enough to hold chocolate like squirrel nuts, he'd say ― went through a series of aerobics before she stamped her foot down and hissed,  _"No!"_

 _"Ah, ah, ah!"_  He wagged his finger.  _"Behave yourself, Princess! You'll have to take my word on this, because it's definitely something you'll want to hear."_ Eugen _e_ unbuttoned his satchel. He always ended cliff-hangers like these with that suspenseful,  _'there's something better than your worries'_  tone, which tickled the childish part of her that she had to push back against.

_(but your sneaky fingers unfortunately knew where to tickle)_

Though no less book-bound and eccentric, the undeterrable chap had grown into a pretty little man child. She, as a princess, had been flowering into a young lady of higher decorum. Eugene said she was planted on the soil of her father's "passive-aggressive oppression" like some sacred rose that couldn't grow past the gate. In his words, the need to exercise her own agency, which was a need he said everyone had, would forever remain,  _"stitched inside gloves"_  that caused her to,  _"sacrifice her happiness for others like a tragic, misunderstood heroine."_  He'd cheekily add,  _"So it would do you some good to plant your own soil."_

_(and what I would've given to make you stop believing that I was one of your storybook characters)_

To Elsa, his parody of her life was an abridged one. Although he never knew why her father shackled her magic to the cotton cuffs, he'd tell her that he knew how her plot would end just by looking at her material. She would somehow  _"save the world from a deadly foe with her super powers"_  after a true love subplot. The "rock bottom" that she'll hit will pave the way to her resolution, and  _"the recovered, voiceless girl will become a heroic 'voicetress' in her own right."_  Until then, the heroine will be stuck in the storyline of,  _"attempting to avoid the darker recesses of her subconscious mind that threaten to unravel her."_

_(and somehow, you laughably broke down more than Papa)_

_"Now, I know it's here SOME-where~..."_  Eugene dangled his leg from the balcony with his foot swinging back and forth. The pages of a sorceress novel were thumbed through until he came to a bookmark.  _"Ah-ha! ― Now, listen to this._  T _he Snow Queen,"_  he narrated dramatically,  _"by Hans Christian Andersen."_

An uprush of perplexity throttled Elsa. Her ears were opening their canals to the size of saucers, but not because the famous title was new to them. It was because Eugene had made an unspoken comparison between her and the Snow Queen. Andersen's frosty regnant was so heartless and inhuman that Elsa retched at the idea of Eugene drawing such a conclusion.

 _"I'm nothing like her,"_  she said with blind rebuke, seeing nothing but her distaste for the opinion that her hall boy held.  _"Now please,"_ ―the girl voice's dissolved into a vulnerable whisper as she made a "scoot" gesture with her hand _―_ _"go away!"_

Eugene glanced minutely at her with a bright, sure, easy face that indicated he was as selfishly engrossed in his discovery as a fanboy who devoured science fiction.  _"Of course not; you're softer than a bunny rabbit even when you try and fail to unsheathe your claws, but there could be a connection."_

Her expression went flat.

He felt her glare almost electrocute the hairs on his arms.  _"What I mean is ― someone's reimagined you before."_

_"She's not **real**."_

_"But you **are** ,"_ he leveled with emollience.

The pause that spaced their words apart was more ambivalent than comforting, because Eugene still looked at her like she was a goddess. On one hand, his rationale was too strong not to occasionally trip over her entire existence. On the other, the reader in him that was still a child obsessively researched her origins via storybooks and mythology, which he always felt emboldened to tell her about with the seriousness of a detective.

He turned to her now and said intelligently,  _"It's Mr. Anderson you should be putting your magnifying glass on, not the Snow Queen."_

The pause this time almost felt staged by him for dramatic effect, but he didn't give her a moment to wring the nerves out of her fingers. The door to the study had been pushed open too soon, and he'd flown from the balcony like a professionally rehearsed Zorro actor. When her tutor entered the room, she ironed her dress with her hands before greeting him―

_"Fitzherbert! What in the Devil―?!"_

Elsa winced at the yell outside, only opening one eye to look at her tutor.

The man's face was redder than a baboon's bottom. _"...Was that―..._ ** _boy_** _rummaging through my book shelves, Your Highness?"_

Her fingers wormed in their clasp. She steeled her face and went on to explain that she had only been in the room for a little more than thirty seconds, and would therefore have no knowledge of a larcenist infiltrating his property.

 _"Strange, then..."_  He stroked his beard.  _"I could've sworn that a hall boy has been robbing me of my sagas, and Fitz is the only hall boy who reads. Illegitimates are no good, you know..."_

She nodded. She pressed her gloved nails into the curves of her palms, but she nodded. This was a scarce, hair-splitting dodge of the scythe for her. Eugene, who was the culprit of her rotten break, did not escape so easily. Judging by the tone she'd heard, Elsa was certain that he'd been caught by none other than Kai in the gardens.

 _"Well,"_  her tutor sighed,  _"we'll come to it in the morning, but keep your eyes open for any reaching hands."_

Elsa nodded smilingly. She chewed on the head of her pencil when he resigned to chalking the board. A flashback of the moment before drifted back to her in a pearly white vignette:

_―"The Snow Queen, by Hans Christian Andersen."_

_―"She's not real."_

_―"But you are."_

_―"It's Mr. Anderson you should be putting your magnifying glass on, not the Snow Queen."_

...Elsa shook her head and tried to put it out of mind. Eugene was book-bound and eccentric, and clues about her life could not be found in fairy tales. When she was a foundling, the only fairy tales she idolized were the ones her parents read to her. Of course, she never adored the unrealistic romances back then, but the adventure novels, specifically the tales of  _the brave queen_  who slewed dragons  **(*)**  and saved her kingdom, stole her heart.  _Her Majesty_  was as much of Elsa's self-insert as  _Flynnigan Rider_  was for Eugene, but she realized too late that she had nothing in common with her, for Elsa would never become a brave heiress who could slay dragons, according to the prophecy of the trolls.

Reality thwarted her possibilities of ever becoming that woman. Collaterally, Eugene was not the man Flynnigan Rider was, and she realized that he strove to become him for that very reason.

...Elsa frowned at the worksheet in front of her, only perking up to adjust her posture when she heard her tutor speak.

 _"Teaching quadratic formulas are often like teaching gymnastics to children,"_  he droned. _"But I trust that you'll reach the end of this labyrinth after one walkthrough, Your Highness."_

Elsa nodded in acceptance of his challenge, big-eyed and beaming. She may have fancied the brave queen from her childhood, but she loved geometry  **(*)**  far more. Numbers were better  _(safer)_  than words and silver-linings found on the wafer-thin pages of storybooks. Her tutor proved that math provided the safety net of being certain, and she knew that each time she solved an equation, the solution would never be uncertain. This was the gulf between Elsa and Eugene: he inhaled storybooks to find guidance; she binged on geometry books to solve problems.

 _―"M'lady, imagination has no circumference,"_  Eugene would still ape.  _"Because you can reimagine myself as anything."_

He'd argue that words were better than numbers because they provided the stage to make one's personal vision manifest. They could not only redefine meanings, character traits, fates, and storylines; they allowed a person to use their own mind to create a world from independent thought. 

 _―"Like you're chasing after something,"_  he'd say about reading.  _"Like if you just keep going, there'll be something even better."_

A well-timed punctuation mark could keep the  _ever-after's_  in place, because the end of a book always secured the safety net of never being uncertain. Like math, there was no,  _"What now?"_  to think about after  _The End_.

 _―"...But after the story's over, it's over."_  And according to his eyes, he'd feel even worse than before he had buried his papercut thumbs into a book, because he wanted that certainty back ― all day, every day.

She curled her bottom lip under her teeth, slowing her pencil.  _'Is there any gulf at all?'_

After uncountable hours spent in confinement, the storyteller was let out without dinner that evening. With  _gulfs_  and  _numbers_  and  _words_  and  _safety-nets_  on her mind, she took a food platter and saw to him at the bottom of a stairwell in the dankest corner of the castle. He was tearing off a piece of stale bread as he glared flatly at the wall, alone and friendless. At first glance, his frail body looked sickeningly thin, demanding that he needed nutrients bread couldn't give. His thin figure suddenly folded its arms and shivered from the chill of the cold winter weather.

She wished that she could have donated better clothing to replace his browning shirt and short sleeves, but those decisions were reinforced by the Crown. How could her father make those calls for servants who never even crossed his line of sight, though?

_(but you never asked for warmth and you never wanted pity)_

Eugene paused to blink at the girl holding a tray of food from the top stair of the cellar. Her eyes looked detached like a fish's as their wet underbellies gleamed. She didn't say a word. She simply placed the tray down in front of him and nudged it with a scrape against the floor, slowly standing up to leave―

_"Thank you."_

Her foot paused on the first step.

 _"...Really,"_  he blubbered, weak from captivity.

She pinched her fingertips, half-turning to claw a lock of hair behind her ear, and then faced him with a sheepish smile. He blinked languidly before looking away to scrub his face with his arm, hoping to scrub off his vulnerable expression.

_(you didn't know there was nothing wrong with sympathy)_

She bade him goodnight and returned to her room. The next day ended with the same predicament, but this time, his response was uncharacteristically somber:

_"How do you picture yourself?"_

Her shaking foot paused on the second step. Heart pounding, Elsa turned and looked over her shoulder. A longer pause would've been seen as impolite, so she granted him the whole of her attention and practiced smiling even though her eyebrows were frowning.  _"I'm sorry,"_ ―a shake of the head; a squint in the eyes― _"but I don't understand._ "

Without looking at her, Eugene crammed a grape into his mouth with the heel of his thumb. His eyes were more removed than she initially knew, but their bags had gray circles. " _As in, how do you imagine yourself when you're older?"_

As her father told her.

_(will-less)_

_"...What would you want to be?"_  she redirected, accidentally abandoning all decorum after hearing her own impulsive, hateable thoughts.

 _"Fearless,_ " he replied, having picked up on her mumble.

The phrase did not necessarily floor her, because his play on the word did not include blizzards and frozen family members at the absence of it. However, she'd long understood the feeling behind it. Although he said his piece with a proud boast, she could see in his face that he wanted to burn his umbilical cord to any of the dark, insecure mentalities spawned by his childhood. Through such obliteration of struggle and trauma, he hoped to rise from the ashes as an invincible, untouchable phoenix no one could break, sadden, minimize, or pity. They wouldn't have the power to do it; life and identity would be in his hands. 

The boy suddenly made a silly smile ― as if smiling kept her from reading between the lines ― and then turned back to his tray.

She didn't quite understand his blindness to what he was; he already appeared quite fearless, strong, and invincible. From what she saw, he was driven to break away because everything around him kept telling him that he couldn't, and that made him braver than she could ever be _._

_(but was the 'carefree, unbeholden individualist' actually carefree or was i looking at an illusionist?)_

_"Thanks...―again,_ " he repeated, seemingly embarrassed by his own position. _"For...giving me something to eat."_

_"...You're welcome."_

But the question,  _"How do you picture yourself?"_  simmered like a flame lit to a piece of paper.

She disappeared inside her room, feeling the spraying artery that he cut open. She knew he made a hobby out of telling the younger orphans in the servant halls to be all that they might wildly imagine themselves to be, but she found the bromide unrealistic. His motto for them was,  _"this is the good part about being a person and not a dog or a cat nature makes for one type of life: you get to find a new dream."_

The more likable side of his go-getter-ness nudged those boys to think that they didn't need to accept the conditions into which they were born. A human given right, by his opinion, included living according to one's own vision. That fanciful existentialism made his "little brothers" feel like their fantasies were capable of coming true with the tools of  _"find a new dream and change the scenery!"_  confidence alone, a fancifulness she never chewed on until now.

_―"...What would you want to be?"_

Elsa scribbled her answer to herself on paper in her bedroom, trying to draw the dimensions of human anatomy with geometric shapes. She stopped when she realized she didn't know how to fill in the details with free-form lines. Her brain had pictured a _head-and-shoulders-above-the-mountains_  woman, sashaying and bellowing over the sunrise with clenched, triumphant fists.

_'...Fearless.'_

―With that goddess's lion-hearted, indomitable essence foaming from her pores. The need to meet her ran so deep that she thought it might end her, but her hands couldn't give her arms and legs. She couldn't even begin the soul of her eyes or the personality of her mouth. Would she be smiling or smirking? Snarling or sneering?

Applying technicality to the art only seemed to mock her lack of agency, and that upset her. The sketcher turned to her mirror for inspiration, but she didn't like the face behind the glass. She didn't like what the eyes glinted with; she didn't like the lips that were twisted into a grimace, yet it was impossible to stop seeing those deformities. Impossible to stop seeing the frozen fractals of an abominable, black-haired girl, with corrupted needs and ugly features, thrashing, raving, and desperate to escape or just kill her.

_(i didn't have a face)_

_'But you can not break character._ '

_(...which one?)_

The following weeks welcomed more starved evenings for Eugene, but now, she did not descend. There was no living through him anymore. He'd fallen into a lifeless, isolated schedule that matched her own.

When his arms grew too bony and feeble to scrub hallway floors, she all but dropped a tray in front of him.  _"You shouldn't keep trying to run away."_

The food that was supposed to be entering his mouth slopped into his lap. He slowly rotated his head and showed her the expression of someone who'd just missed a joke.  _"Come again?"_

Her opening line had not been harsh. Her tiny feet could not yet fill the shoes of a tyrant. She merely gave him a tired, drawn face that aimed to project her hopelessness onto him.  _"Kai will put you back in solitary confinement tomorrow."_

Silence.

Then, a witty catchphrase:  _"Let 'em try."_  He closed his eyes indignantly and snorted his food, chewing with enthusiasm.  _"I'll be the best hurricane they've ever seen. Doors and gates won't stop me."_

His surety was completely out of touch with reality. His eyes wore pockets of broken blood vessels, his faded shirt sank with the concavity of his chest, and his wrists were mottled with fingerprints where strong hands had manhandled him.

_(a man made out of stardust and hurricane-weather could've slipped through cracks and flown out with the breeze, but you're still breaking nails and skin trying to scratch doors open)_

Ire exploded in her ears like a blood clot, and while it was an unsettling thing to feel, she felt her eardrums bleed with it.  _"Why can't you accept it?"_

The brown ran out of Eugene's face faster than air from a punctured bag. The silence in the present moment was more vicious than silence itself, and her diaphragm closed shut. She had planned a lecture, but wasn't quite sure what to make of the fact that she had allowed herself to become so thoroughly tainted by her own feelings.

_(i could feel the wax melting from your wings)_

Her exposure to this side of him made her feel as though she had crushed the skull of a flapping bird with her shiny, bronze boot, and she immediately felt sick for turning his spirit into powder.

_(i defeathered you)_

Elsa watched the carefree teenager turn rigid. She made a few small sounds of an apologetic nature, but not a single croak made it past her lips.

Then, without word, he leaned forward on knees and elbows, arranged his folded hands in front of him, and stared up into her eyes with hard, searching ones of his own.  _"Princess...I_ ** _refuse_** _to accept_ ** _this_** _."_

_(...and i always rejected the fact that this was why i liked you so much, Eugene...)_

Like a brittle corpse, she dropped her gaze and shook her head with a bobbing mouth, palming her nose with the heel of her hand.  _"That wasn't what I...I didn't mean to say―..."_  The atmosphere bled, and the silence sharpened into a knife.  _"...I didn't mean them..."_  whispered she.

_(i didn't mean to pierce your skin with more words)_

With the shake of his head, Eugene briefly smiled through what looked like heartache.  _"I didn't 'endure' all this and come all this way for words like 'just accept it.' I've got a different set of vowels than you do."_ But his expression burned with an unsaid lecture:  ** _"At least I flew. When did you?"_**

Her oxygen thinned. She stood inert, surrending to the emotions operating under the threshold of her subconsciousness.

_"Are_ **_you_ ** _comfortable curled up at the back of your sob-story, or do you want to get up?"_

...The space between her eyebrows closed, and with a twitch of pain, the nerves laced in her forehead began to dance.

This breed of silence was bone-crushing ― inevitably giving her enough time to wonder when and how their roles got switched. She was not herself within these minutes, and he sensed that. She was neither herself, which he knew to be the quiet, friendly child he met on his first day, nor the withdrawn kidult called Princess Elsa. She was a nameless entity drifting along the clouds of some netherworld ― a walking mist of white unable to take form. Through this one stare, the porcelain doll had shown him the bottom of her icicle ribs.

Now his face was all apology and weak bones and dirt smeared on his cheeks, like he wanted to hand her a knife and tell her to twist it in his gut.  _"Prin―"_

_"Where would you run...?"_

_"...Beg your pardon?"_

She silently slid over to the end of the bottom step, sat down after folding her dress under her legs, and closed her thighs against her hands as a tear dropped off her throat. Strangely and blankly she ran her gaze all over him, with the eyes of a child submerged in sleep.  _"...Where...would you_ ** _run_** _...?"_

The muscles in his visage softened for her. She supposed that he wanted to sit a hot hand on her cold fingers, babble an apology, laugh nervously about a joke to take the devastation away, negotiate a bargain for something to make it up, or promise to scrub her bedroom floors twice a morning, but he supposed those actions couldn't bandaid the artery he cut open.

He went on watching her, eyes flying up and down her face, before looking away and thumbing his nose to keep it from growing wetter.  _"Ahh...let's see...where ― would I ―_ ** _run_** _...?"_  He drummed his fingers against his knee with dimples pocking his chin as he imitated a serious brooder.

Another tear fell from her eyelash, but she continued to sit like a mannequin in a public display window.

 _"Is...'anywhere' a certifiable answer?"_  he laughed self-consciously, rubbing his eyelids with an index finger and peeking up at her.

Something was ghosting in and out of her eyes like sea creatures underwater, but she looked down before she could have him know it, and then twisted her fingers like a person who was suffering from claustrophobia,  _"...Where's 'anywhere'?_ "

 _"...I guess ― well ― you know,_ ** _anywhere_** _..."_  Becoming more self-conscious and uncertain than before, he dropped the back of his head against the wall behind him, eyes chasing his feelings.  _"_ ** _Any_** _'anywhere'..."_  When something seemingly funny graced his mind, he closed those eyes and bit his lip with a soporific expression before releasing his lip to murmur:  _"Anywhere but nowhere."_

_(you were a child of Neptune ― an in-between dream state of oblivion reaching for infinity)_

She blinked at his mouth, frowning.

Eugene opened one eye at her, giving a mock face of solemnity. He curled his lips into a smile.  _"So I can be, 'tanned, rested, and alone.'"_

...She made a half-sigh, half-snort to substitute a laugh, tucking her hair behind her ear. Elsa knuckled her swollen nose as another tear hit her lap like a fallen star.  _"You're incorrigible."_

_(i was Pluto ― the blue-gray child furthest from the sun)_

His shoulders laughed up and down, pitifully at best. A warmer smile seesawed up on his face.

She forced a smile back, and then looked down.

_(...and i liked you more than i shoul_ _d've_ _)_

_"Say..."_  A cup of water clattered against the tray as he set it down and faced her with his entire body. He proceeded to cross his legs and hold onto the toes of his shoes, craning his face into hers to whisper behind the back of his hand, _"Wanna stage a 'scandalous' skedaddle?"_

...Her face closed like a door.

_"Now, hold on ― let me ease your conscience―"_

_―"A 'scandalous skedaddle'?"_  she repeated.

_"Exactly right, Princess, but ― hang on, hang on, now don't make that face ― just allow me to ask one tiny question before you shoot me down."_

The princess continued to wait with her lips puckered into an involuntary pout.

He added,  _"And then you'll never have to listen to me blabber again."_

An eyebrow shot up.

He cocked his head, eyes big and bright, and wagged both of his.

Her pursed lips fought a smile.

_(...sometimes i wished i hadn't liked you)_

_"...Do you have any tangible aspirations in life, Princess?"_  He watched her with one probing eye as a smirk spread across his face.

Elsa flinched.  _"What do you mean by aspirations...?"_

_"You_ **_know._ ** _Dreams, HOPES, wish-lists._ _Your absolute greatest ― and I mean GREATEST ― longings in the whole wide star-system."_

_"And why would I want to tell you that?"_

_"Because whatever you say, nothing will change, so someone might as well know, right?"_

She turned away to shut her eyes and hide her expression from him, exhaling rather impatiently, " _Oh,_   _I don't know―"_

_"C'man, 'COURSE you do."_

The princess sighed and shook her head, looking at her gloved hands.  _"It doesn't matter."_  She covered one with the other.  _"Papa―"_

 _"Right. The ― uh ―_ _overprotective_ _dad who tells you to stay indoors for the rest of your life ― but what do you do after a whole afternoon's seminar on politics? Go to your room? What comes next?"_  He followed the movement of her head when she broke eye contact to look forward.

 _'...I look out the window.'_  Her cheek twitched. The eyelashes began fluttering again. The sogginess started coming back. When she looked down, he needed nothing more than that.

 _"That's what I thought,"_  he concluded under his breath.

She hugged her knees tighter. Why did she  **allow**  herself to sound so upset about those circumstances, like she wished she could be someone else tonight by being where she wasn't supposed to be? They both came here to forget and face something, but the girl's drawbridge had dropped open ― accidentally, maybe, yet enough for him to crawl in.

 _"You help me get out of here, and I help you get what you want,"_  he baited. His eyes all but encased the following word in sunlight:  _"Freedom."_

...The restrained look on her face after he said that motivated him to shovel even deeper.

 _"Let's put our heads together,"_  he bribed with an extra creamy voice.  _"You're smart. You have access to doors I can't open. You can smile real pretty and get the keys from guards I can't. We can take a long boat ― get as far away from the gates as possible ― and then make a beeline for Yggdrasil. After we reach the mountains, we'll shake hands and go our separate ways."_

The princess kept glaring at him, but he saw something growing on her eye ― a twinkling light, a ripple of water rising from the pupil.

He drew himself into her, voice alive and sudden, requesting that she be his dovetail:  _"Don't think about the math we can't get around, think of this like reading a story: this is you closing your eyes and feeling the sensation of something greater than the walls in your life."_

Tears were blinked out of her eyes. Scared tears. Desperate tears. Imagination now obliterated of its circumference, his dialect and clever imagery brought a picture of what-if's into still-frame. It provided the arms and legs to make her personal vision manifest, permitting her to imagine a world of independent will―

_"Nothing will happen except what you want to happen, Princess."_

―and it was terrible to watch him, with his sunrise eyes, and sky-fevered face, as his silver tongue made her chords vibrate to terrifying pulses. 

 _"We'll both be stepping on soil we want."_  He ticked his head with grinning teeth.  _"You won't have to worry about anyone making you feel bad, imperfect, or as low as the ground. No gloves, no doors...no right, no wrong, no rules, no appellations, compromises, gates, or criticizers...just free."_

...What was this meteorite in her stomach?

_"So what's your choice?"_

She sat motionlessly, lips parted and eyes racing across his. 

_("What's your_ **_choice_ ** _?")_

Her body was frightened by what her heart felt. All the feelings laming her legs ― all the captivity followed by half a dynasty of watching birds through windows ― screamed for those liberties, and Eugene was the escape hatch that provided a longboat to open, free waters. He knew that her real self, raw, reformed, deprived of the gates and stuffy wardrobes, and dancing to the music of her own heartbeat, begged to be uncensored, just this once.

_"We'll part ways as unlikely friends. Sound edible enough for you?"_

Having said this, the better sense in her that would never simply "go away" became aware of the fact that he was trying to sway, tear, and undress the obligations her father clothed her. He read her out loud, telling her that he could see what she wanted ― how rebelling against the rectitude of her parents was a healthy part of growing up ― how something was a form of rejection ― and so on. His face was lit up with stupid effect, and all at once, she hated it.

_(why were you trying to con an impressionable child?)_

_"Be honest ― about everything, everything you're thinking and feeling at the same time."_

And so she was:  _"I have a responsibility; you don't."_

He flinched at her compliant, matter-of-factly statement, and the stupid sunrise in his eyes finally set.

_(i wasn't born to make choices)_

However, she was more than aware that her phrase was merely coming from the mouth of someone holding a twisted arm. Her reaction was a recital of her father's points ― lines she rehearsed in the mirror with muscle-memory until they became the marrow that supported her bones. She could hear the sound of her heartbeats clashing with her own vocal chords.

Unfortunately, Eugene could, too.  _"I wasn't asking the king."_  He examined the girl in front of him with frantic pupils that wouldn't stay in one spot, determined to see this ploy through to the very end.  _"And I'm not asking Princess Elsa; I'm asking_ ** _Elsa_** _."_

 _"Her answer would be the same as theirs,"_  she persisted. Her voice was rocky with confusion, angry at him for undoing every lock on the privy chambers in her mind, and angry at herself for knowing his idea of her was accurate.

 _"What would you rather be?"_  he milked.  _"A comet, or a dying star?"_

...Cripes did he know how to work it.

_(the point is to fly neither too low nor too high, but to follow the path of flight)_

The glow of accomplishment was almost shining off his greasy face. He smiled with the thrusting of his hand, pausing for her to take it and give his dirty palm a shake.

She stared at the lines on it.

_"What'd you say, Princess? Partners?"_

She didn't say anything; the blank wall of her face didn't move; the cracked ice in her eyes didn't melt. He turned his palm over, opening it, waiting for her fingers to kiss his. They never did.

_"...Princess?"_

She glanced at her shoulder with melancholy, deciding that he was harmless, titillative, and foolish. Her fear of making wrong decisions and failing her family was larger than any resentment or ambition to be freed from it.

 _"...Elsa?"_  He withered now.

Her reply came low, soft, and final:  _"Goodnight, Eugene."_

The effect worked: he deflated. The princess could see by the clockwork on his face that he was trying to think, but there was not one loose screw in her psyche for him to put a crowbar under and jimmy out. She stood with the somberness of her decision, dusted her blue dress, and then picked up his tray.

...Eugene looked away and massaged the rim of his ear, smiling and blinking like a blind, emotional child who'd just been left out in the rain again. Elsa dabbed the sweat on her forehead with the side of her wrist to disguise her restless guilt, much of which she despised herself for having at all. For all his tricks and gambits, there was no doubting that he had the power  _(or was it a lack of self-esteem?)_  to think he had nothing to lose by being as extraordinary a character as he could be,  _because he didn't_. Nothing beside him to look at him real soft, nothing beside him to hug him and tell him that he was fine the way he was. What he did have had been taken from him a long time ago, but she still had roots here.

Elsa shivered once, but came no closer to his sunken shoulders. When his eyes held with hers, they were so horrifically vague that she had to look away. There had been no ambition in them, no light of battle, no jest, no foolish aspirations ― just a defeated boy on the brink of surrender.

But he quickly turned and wiped his sleepless, baggy eyes, taking no less than ten seconds to slip back into his old skin and sigh theatrically,  _"Welp, I had a feeling you'd be like this. There's no removing the statue of Aphrodite from her obelisk without ten men, after all."_  The easy, gay shrug of his shoulders seemed to say that she should dismiss him without looking deeper, but she knew all too well that his emotions had taken him seawards.

All that remained to do now was to close her mouth, forbid return, and leave him to grope the floors for what scraps of dignity he had left.

_(you are not made out of stardust)_

She walked down the hallway to her room, passing through clearings bright with sunlight and dark with shadow. After a while, the lines began forming themselves into a pattern of bars on her face.

_(This is why you're not a bird)_

Tears burned the whites of her eyes as she marched faster.

_(This is why you're just a boy)_

She locked her bedroom door and chained the gap with erratic hands, sinking down the paint like a unicorn who'd been shot in the back.

_(but...)_

_― "Are you comfortable curled up at the back of your sob-story, or do you want to get up?"_

She broke down between her knees.

_―"What's your **choice**?"_

The reflection in the mirror that always waited stared back at her. Thrashing, raving, desperate to escape or just kill her.

_―_ **"Frozen in the life you've chosen."**

To the right lied a sketch of empty circles and lines. It was incomplete. Stillborn. Unable to take organic form.

_―"...How do you picture yourself...?"_

She smeared snot and tears across her mouth. 

_―"As in, how do you imagine yourself when you're older?"_

The girl wobbled forward, picked up the old sketch, and looked for a face among the eraser marks.

_―"...What would **you**  want to be?"_

She placed it on the floor and bent over it, raising a shaky hand armed with her pencil.

 _―"M'lady, imagination has no circumference. You can reimagine yourself as anything_. _"_

Tears browned the paper. The pencil dragged through them.

_―"...if you just keep going, there'll be something even better."_

Her hand lifted.

_―"How do you―"_

**―"Fear will be your enemy."**

_"―picture yourself?"_

She pressed her tongue to the corner of her mouth, and held up her work.  _'...Fearless.'_  With hair like the feathers of a phoenix, a dress that glimmers like the stars, and eyes that burn like the breaking dawn.

_(this is how I picture myself)_

_'My invincible me.'_

_(this is who i reimagine myself to be)_

A tear slid past her smile.

_(...my new dream)_

She wrapped her arms around the woman and hugged her against her heart.

_―"Don't think about the math we can't get around, think of this like reading a story: this is you closing your eyes and feeling the sensation of something greater than the walls in your life."_

_❄ ._

. ❆

_❄ . (i'd forgotten that Pluto was the planet of rebirth and transformation)_

* * *

_"Promise me that you'll never be a number,_

_or a majority; to always make your heart beat_

_in a way that makes you know you're alive,_

_and here,_

_and special,_

_and worth it..."_

**~(by Peppermint-Pictures)**

* * *

 

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Anyway, the thing about "life is what one imagines itself to be" is canonically true for Elsa. Jennifer Lee likes to say how her powers come out is connected to her vision of herself, that what she imagines her powers to be, and herself to be, is what they become, so be that a curse or a gift, it manifests as she imagines it, hence quotes like, "one thought crystallizes an icy blast" and "fear will be your enemy."
> 
> It's a nice indicator that her control is dictated by self-image, not the prospect of "controlling" emotions and outbursts [a misconception in a part of the Frozen fanbase, which was actually just Elsa's and her father's misinterpretation], so I wanted to play with what Eugene's arc in Tangled stands for as a counterbalance, as well as a storyline Elsa eventually decides to bandwagon when she hits those mountains, too.


End file.
